Quotes About Oratory

What the people call eloquence is the facility some persons have of speaking alone and for a long time, aided by extravagant gestures, a loud voice, and powerful lungs.

Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. It is an insult to an assembly of reasonable men, disgusting and revolting instead ofpersuading. Speeches measured by the hour, die by the hour.

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.

The Greeks shape bronze statues so real they seem to breathe, And carve cold marble until it almost comes to life. The Greeks compose great orations, and measure The heavens so well they can predict the rising of the stars. But you, Romans, remember your great arts; To govern the peoples with authority, To establish peace under the rule of law, To conquer the mighty, and show them mercy once they are conquered. -Virgil, Aeneid VI, 847-853

Persuasion hung upon his lips.

La escritura daba la impresión que alejaba al hombre del conocimiento, que almacenaba sus recuerdos. También alejaba al orador del oyente, colocándolo a muchos kilómetros o años de distancia.

I sometimes marvel at the extraordinary docility with which Americans submit to speeches.

Horace Greeley's conversation inevitably becomes a speech.

Stephen Douglas's oratory was designed for the galleries, Lincoln's for his peers

he had detailed, well-thought-out proposals for a campaign of films, posters and press publicity to win the people to these ideas. Collins had political skills and powers of oratory of which the least that can be said is that he was better equipped than most men to make his dreams come true.

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.

Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course. The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so "hungry for honey," that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the "protector of the people" rises to supreme power

Is it not shameful that men should be ruled by orators, who "go ringing on in long harangues, like brazen pots which, when struck, continue to sound till a hand is put upon them"?

Oratees are addicts. Strung out on an Ambassador's Language.

A twenty-minute eulogy, unless composed by a) William Shakespeare, b) Winston Churchill, or c) Mark Twain, is sixteen minutes too long. Technical note: It is better to tell a eulogist to speak for four minutes not five minutes. "Five minutes" to the modern ear sounds like "around five minutes," whereas "four minutes" means "four minutes.

Sources of interest and excitement were not lacking during the season. If politics ran high, as in the years when revolution was preparing, society could gather at the capitol and listen to the classic oratory of Richard Henry Lee, or the fervid speeches of Patrick Henry, dressed in his suit of peach-blossom velvet, and defying King George, to the great alarm of the conservative land-owning gentry.

She sucks at her words as they come out. She seems to practise a constant fellatio on the words she pronounces.

What orators lack in depth they make up for in length.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

Rhetoric is nothing but reason well dressed and argument put in order.

I try to turn a written thing, when I'm in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.

The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation.

There is not only an art, but an eloquence in it.